“I found the documents with Peter’s birthplace. But we’ll have to get Oleg to translate this one.”
“I told you before that one’s already translated. Are you listening to me at all?” Betsy snapped.
“Don’t get all touchy. I need your help — take a look at this.”
“You want to look incompetent so you can go back to taking notes for your book.”
Then she called me Eric. I called her a bitch. She told me to fuck off. I stomped out of the room, abandoning the Eurasian continent for the tropical shower. When I came to bed she was already asleep.
We were both sick of the delay, which might be putting our adoption in jeopardy, and was definitely costing us hundreds of dollars. We were sick of Oleg too. The only good news was that he’d be going back home to Dnipropetrovsk while we waited for the director to sign our final document. The bad news was that once he left, it would be just the two of us.
V
It was February 25, the day I would become Peter and Bohdan’s father, and Betsy their mother. We woke up at 6:30 am in our Ternopil flat. We’d have two court hearings to legalize the adoption of our sons. Then we’d drive back to the flat, pack our things, and drive all night to fly home from Kyiv.
In Ternopil for Bohdan’s hearing we were ushered into a courtroom with whitewashed walls, hard wooden benches, and the blue and yellow Ukrainian trident hanging on the front wall. Other than the trident, the stark room resembled a Mennonite church from before the war. The judge was a young man in a turtleneck, with a high-pitched voice. The chief prosecutor was a woman and she sat in front of the judge. We sat beside Oleg, our bench facing the judge, the prosecutor, and a recording secretary.
Immediately behind us sat the doctor from Bohdan’s orphanage and the woman in charge of orphanages in the region. Both kept their large fur coats on. The doctor got up when the judge prompted her. Oleg translated her testimony in a whisper: Bohdan “had an improved psychological state” when he knew we would adopt him.
“This means he is happier,” said Oleg.
Because Ukrainian law recognized the man as household head, I was prepared to do most of the talking. In the cab Betsy had told me I should make sure to look the judge in the eye when speaking since my shyness in public can make me look evasive, even dishonest. But the judge asked the same questions as all the other hearings, to which I gave the same answers while trying to look trustworthy and conscientious. After a twenty-minute recess he came back with a document approving our adoption of Bohdan. I had a new son and joyful music sounded in my mind — Charlie Parker playing “Yardbird Suite.”
Now we had to drive three hours to Koropets for Peter’s court case. Betsy and I held hands for a while and then settled back into our cramped seat space in the taxi without talking. Snow fell on the winding country roads, swirling in the wind and blanking out the view. Sometimes a truck emerged from the snow and I heard a displaced roar as it went past.
During the long drive to Koropets on the snow-covered highway the cab tires hummed softly and smoothly at concert A pitch, the same sound I remembered from childhood, driving on the Disraeli Freeway to my aunt Lil’s house back in Winnipeg, before they paved the bridges smooth and quiet. I associated that humming sound with stories about the war, the same stories over and over but full of gaps and Dickensian coincidences.
As an adult, when I started a book about my family history, I drove twice on the now-silent bridges over the Red River to North Kildonan to see how many gaps my aunt could fill. She told me the whole story, her hand shaking on the coffee pot, her black hair turned perfectly white.
By 1944, Lil and my father were living on a beautiful estate fifty kilometres from Berlin with their mother Helen and her in-laws. Helen had married a German agricultural officer, Helmut Simon, whom she’d met in Ukraine. They’d spent most of 1943 travelling west with the retreating German army.
The two-storey Simon house overlooked a small lake and tall chestnut trees. The house had three balconies, and summer guests went rowing on the lake. The Simons made some extra money putting up these tourists. Helen’s in-laws lived on the main floor, along with the city folks. In the basement Mrs. Simon, Helmut’s mother, cooked for everyone. Helen, Dad, and Lil lived on the second floor. Lil and my father enjoyed living in the house, on the big estate. They even attended school for a few months. In early June cherries and strawberries ripened along the lakeshore.
Then Germany began to conscript all available men to replace the millions of dead soldiers in the east. In 1944, Simon was called up. Helen had just given birth to the only child she had with Simon — baby Helmut was six weeks old when his father left in the fall.
Simon wrote home from the front in Stettin in 1945, on a Feldpostkarte or “postcard from the field.” The postcard said: “I am an ordinary soldier, which I thought I’d never be in my life again.”
There was nothing ordinary about the eastern front. The Germans had killed ninety-seven percent of Russian POWs, and the Red Army rank and file knew that. There were no more postcards from Simon. Rumours flew about the Soviet advance on Berlin and about the barbarism of the soldiers. The Simon estate was directly in the Soviet army’s path to Berlin.
What my father remembers about the day the Red Army invaded appears in flashes, fragments that he has shown me over the years. He was playing beside the lake with a toy truck, just like any other day, when a Russian plane came out of the sky, giant, noisy, strafing the trees with bullets. He ran inside. He didn’t know where his sister and mother were. Tanks and what must have been personnel carriers drove through the fence and over the cherry trees and strawberry vines until the tracks were red with squashed fruit.
Then soldiers got out of the vehicles, and this part he told me when I was a kid. They threw grenades into the lake, and then watched to see the dead fish and toads float to the lake’s surface. My father felt the explosions in his feet and legs as he ran from the window, as his mother called him, and they hid in the basement.
I could only piece together what happened next from Lil.
The soldiers entered the basement and shot wildly, bullets ricocheting off the concrete walls, making strange music as they shattered the light bulbs. One soldier pushed old Mrs. Simon behind the coal bin and she screamed. Lil heard a thump like a body falling.
Lil could hear what happened to Mrs. Simon but not see it. She was in the basement hiding in the chute under a pile of coal. Her mother had told her not to move until she called her. Lil knew now why her mother had sent her there, in that filthy place, to hide. She tried to cry without making sounds.
Dad does not know where his mother was when the soldiers entered the house.
Lil could hear the soldiers yelling on the stairs as they dragged her mother. She understood what they said in Russian but mostly it was cursing. Her mother talked in German almost as if she were talking to my dad, trying to get him to do something he didn’t want to.
“Cunt. Fucking cunt.” The soldiers’ speech slurred and overlapped.
“Bitch.” She heard the sound of ripping, spitting, and then the pounding started again.
Lil couldn’t guess how many men there were, but more than two. Once, her mother made loud sounds, like an animal in pain, but then her voice subsided. After what seemed like a long time the men’s voices went away. Helen called her daughter. She was at the stove, putting on a kettle with a shaking hand, her dress torn and cheek bruised, but she continued with meal preparations as if nothing had happened.
The soldiers came back for about a week and the same nothing happened over and over, at any time of day or night.
My father always refused to admit he remembered any of this. When pressed, he told me he remembered a drunken soldier backing over one of the last trees standing on the estate, a sapling, with his tank.
As the cab braked suddenly to make the long descent to Koropets, I wondered what unspoken traumas lay hidden in the boys’ past, what stories they might tell their children, if they w
ould be as tongue-tied as me and my father. Then the sun came out of the fog where Peter’s orphanage lay nestled in the Carpathian foothills, like a scene on a postcard. We stopped to pick up the orphanage lawyer and the director, putting six people in a compact sedan designed for four. But we had only a few kilometres to the courthouse, which was a bare room with a large wire cage for accused criminals. The cage had a tiny ivy plant in an upper corner with one tendril moving optimistically across the top.
The judge, a red-faced man with a yellow shirt and frayed sports coat, entered with an attending secretary. We rose and he waved us back into our seats. In Ukrainian he announced the purpose of our case, to approve our adoption of Peter, and then suddenly began speaking English. “What is your name?”
Oleg had to nudge me out of my seat. I felt not only tired and hungry but completely confused by the judge’s perfect English accent. I stood up and answered.
“Occupation?” he asked.
“Writer,” I responded. Suddenly the air went dead and the judge reddened even more. I repeated writer in a loud monotone, thinking that the judge had not understood my pronunciation. The time stretched out and became rubber.
I saw myself as I imagined he must: an unemployable narcissist, born in the US, with a Canadian passport, divorced once, dependent on his new wife for money. This man with the perfect English accent and alcoholic’s nose could bring his gavel down in careless judgment and we’d have nothing.
“My wife and I just want to have a family,” I said out loud, deferentially.
Oleg spoke rapidly in Ukrainian and the judge’s flush receded. The judge had paused at the edge of his English vocabulary, and Oleg rescued him from the cliff of his pride. That’s what fixers were for.
The judge asked, through Oleg, the same questions I had in the morning. I gave the same answers, including my Ukrainian heritage story, but departing from the script, I also blurted out that it was very difficult to adopt healthy children at home.
“Don’t say that,” Oleg hissed, and did not translate my gaffe. I evaded his eyes and the judge’s. Betsy looked pale.
“Dyakuyu,” I said, thank you, and stopped talking. Oleg stared at me and Betsy did too. But at that moment I refused to try to justify adopting our sons any more. Relief flowed through me like mulled wine because I knew that the judge would say yes regardless; any further talk was just an empty formality. I knew what Betsy and I had paid to stand there. I knew how my family had paid with their bodies and with their ugly, fragmented stories, and how my grandmother stared grimly at a camera a few months before she died, in 1948, so I could stand here wordless and hopeful.
While waiting for the judge to make a decision we took turns sitting in his chair and photographing each other. Betsy moved her hands through her lush brown hair, pushing it back behind her ears for the picture in a gesture at once familiar to me and startling, her angular face and long fingers fierce with energy. Oleg looked so comically grim in his simulation of the judiciary that I could imagine him presiding over some kangaroo court in Soviet times.
Finally the judge returned with his secretary. She handed him a two-page document covered with finely printed Ukrainian. He cleared his throat and read every word. According to Ukrainian law, we were approved as Peter’s adoptive parents, but we had to wait thirty days to pick him up.
Thirty days. When the snow melts.
VI
At the airport Nikolai, Oleg, and Andrey shook our hands with bone-mangling sincerity. Betsy and I boarded the plane less than half awake. The first leg of our trip was on Ukraine International Airlines. They served varenyky and fried sausages for breakfast, but even better, you could order alcohol immediately, at 7:30 am.
I drank two glasses of red wine and then repositioned my pillow, writhing for half an hour in the small seat. The hell with sleep. I couldn’t get over the feeling that the boys probably imagined we too were never coming back. That despair over abandonment must have been what my dad felt when his mother died. And I felt it too, trying to understand why Dad had kept running ever since the war, dragging my mother and sister and me, throughout the whole of my childhood, all over the Christly planet.
Dad said his sense of his own father, Cornelius, was “a blank.” He never heard anything about him until arriving in Winnipeg as an orphan at the age of ten, and then his uncle Henry was the only one who spoke about Cornelius.
Henry was the drunkest, saddest, most atheistic and poetry-loving of Dad’s maternal uncles. He’d been an adult when Cornelius was marched out of his home. Once near the end of his life Uncle Henry told me that Cornelius “had no sense at all, he was so goddamn religious.” But Henry couldn’t tell the story. The one time he tried, he became so overwrought, crying and shouting, that he was incoherent. Much of his anger had to do with his own father, a religious maniac who kept his wife constantly pregnant and took pleasure in beating his children.
So I turned to my aunt Lil, who told me that, as a choir leader, Cornelius had led his youth group in a hymn, right in his own living room. They sang the religious words and they sang loudly. His neighbour reported the subversive activity. The authorities fabricated a charge of poisoning horses, a serious offence in an agricultural community. But everyone knew my grandfather was arrested at the end of 1937 because, as a Mennonite, he chose to sing only Christian words with his choir, not communist youth anthems. That was his crime against the state and his family. He never came back.
After the war my family assumed Cornelius had died somewhere up north in a labour camp, where work could set you free of your body. For Mennonites, not having his body was terrible, though. No matter how simple a church funeral was, the casket always stayed open so everyone could say goodbye. You couldn’t say goodbye to a rumour, or a government document, or even a photograph.
In 1999 Lil got an official letter from Ukraine. The letter said that “with regard to the repressed Mierau, Cornelius,” the former Soviet government had exonerated him of the charge that he was an enemy of the state. His exoneration was “due to lack of evidence.”
The official letter also explained, in one sentence, how and when my grandfather died. He was shot on February 2, 1938, less than two months after his arrest, in the city of Zaporozhye, Ukraine. Lil showed me the duly notarized death certificate she received in 2000. She translated for me: the authorities on Lenin Avenue in Zaporozhye registered his execution in the Book of Acts of Death.
My grandfather made the choice not to run from the Soviet authorities, but he could not choose the vehicle of his death, a single bullet to his head. His widow Helen, my grandmother, chose to take her children and flee with the German army in 1943. She did not choose what happened to her later, outside Berlin when the Red Army arrived in their grimy, bloodstained vehicles. My dad, an infant when the authorities arrested his father, and a child when his mother took him to Germany, had no choice whatsoever.
My aunt Lil once told me that Henry had said to her: “If your dad, Corny, hadn’t been so honest, he might have been able to escape. He could have hidden in other villages. Some Ukrainians took in Mennonites who had trouble.”
Lil believed that her father was too committed to his faith to run away. Running would have been cowardly. She believed her uncle Henry was a godless man, and that his judgment was questionable.
But my grandfather’s story was complicated, and hiding might or might not have worked. Mennonites were German-speaking pacifists and mostly farmers, and the ones who were left since the 1920s only small landholders. All Soviet citizens carried passports and my grandfather’s said GERMAN on the lower right corner. The communist government saw all Mennonites as a national minority, a threat to the state. My family would have been surprised to know that they were seen as a threat, or that they were about to experience something which historians would later call the Great Terror.
In the only close-up photograph of Cornelius that exists, he appeared plain, determined. He wore a white shirt with a tie and a toothbrush moustache. I coul
d understand why a man who looked like this could take a foolish risk. He believed in the next life, the one he was pushed into, with great faith. He believed in the pleasure of music. Part of me admired his pig-headed recklessness — a quality my father and I share, and which had landed Cornelius in the Book of Death. I thought of how Peter had pulled me and Betsy into him when we first met, a deep physical embrace of the Book of Life.
On the plane Betsy snored faintly beside me. I tucked the blanket around her shoulders and at last fell fitfully asleep before we reached Vienna, the wine’s tannins jostling my brain, my body too long for the available space, the past a foreign country I could not escape.
VII
At home in Winnipeg our two cats, Alty and Ranger, had missed us: they rubbed against my legs and talked. Jeremy, when he was twelve, had picked out Alty at the humane society. When we brought her home she jumped on top of the bookcase where she could keep an eye on the room. Jeremy flipped through my Latin dictionary and found the word altissimus or “most high,” and he named her Alty.
We called Ranger, who was black and white, the Trauma Cat. Her original owner, an old woman, had to move into a nursing home, and a social worker attempted to drive Ranger out of the basement ceiling using a broomstick without success. Finally a cat-loving neighbour managed to coax Ranger from the basement with food, and then persuaded Betsy to adopt her. Since then, Ranger had been deeply suspicious of almost everyone; I hoped she might take to the boys.
We started immediately to prepare the house for the boys’ arrival in a month. Betsy painted their room and I drove around town picking up supplies and traveller’s cheques, and running other errands. At Zellers we spent $800 on children’s clothing in about half an hour. Then we bought bunk beds, a chest of drawers, a toy chest, and some toys, and worked together to put it all in place.
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